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We Must Stop Thinking the Rich Are Better

Matt Bruenig is back in the land on the public intellectual, The UBI Already Exists for the One Percent. In the article, he notes that roughly 30 percent of all income in the United States comes in the form of capital. That is: 30 percent of the money made each year comes not from work but just from capitalists owning things. A total of 10% of our nation’s income is paid out to the top one percent in this form. That is: they don’t work for it; they just sit back and get checks sent to them. This is effectively a universal basic income (UBI) — except it isn’t universal; it just goes to the very richest among us.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We could just take that 30 percent and distribute it evenly to everyone in society. It is, after all, a shared resource. Bruenig compares it to the Alaska Permanent Fund, where everyone who lives in Alaska gets an equal share of the capital gains from the oil that is pumped out of the ground. So why don’t we do this more generally? Well, obviously, there are reasons. Even ask poor people and they will tell you: if people don’t have to work, they will just become a bunch of loafers and society will fall apart.

Why Do We Trust the Rich?

Bruenig is making a very limited point, “If you have a problem with this, but not the current arrangement where capital income is paid out in huge sums to small fractions of our society, then your issue is not really with passive income.” And that is certainly true. But I look at it from a broader perspective. The problem is that humans are hierarchical. And as much as we may think we have grown past the days of feudal lords, we really haven’t. Almost everyone I know believes what is the great lie of our economic system: the rich are different from you and me.

For most Americans, that means that not having to work doesn’t corrupt the rich while it does the poor. The interesting thing is that Fitzgerald, who we get that misquote from, felt exactly the opposite. He felt that great wealth hindered the rich. It’s funny that people have gotten the impression that Fitzgerald had a fascination with the rich. Have they not read his books? It’s like saying that Steinbeck had a fascination with floods and mice.

The truth is that we don’t know. If we distributed all the passive income of the US equally, each man, woman, and child would be given a bit less than $16,000 per year. I don’t think that would be enough money to cause everyone to sit on their couches and watch video games. The experience I have with people is that having a basic income to fall back on would make them more likely to take risks. We might have flying cars now if those tens of millions of poor people had been able to do something productive rather than scraping to get by.

The Problem Is Our Sociology

We have to get past this idea that the rich actually deserve their wealth. That just isn’t the way our economic system works. But I can understand why the rich believe it. What I don’t understand is why the poor are so fond of this myth. Why do poor children have poor parents and vise versa? It’s like we live in the Third Reich and believe that everything is determined by genetics. But if you really believe that Donald Trump is rich because of the genes his father gave him and not the money he gave him, you’re an idiot.

This is why I see more and more that we have to get past politics. We need to change the way we think. Our problems are sociological. If we can see the way we are as a society, the political and economic solutions are trivial.

Image of Matt Bruenig cropped from one at Gawker. Licensed under Fair Use.

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About Frank Moraes

Frank Moraes is a freelance writer and editor online and in print. He is educated as a scientist with a PhD in Atmospheric Physics. He has worked in climate science, remote sensing, throughout the computer industry, and as a college physics instructor. Find out more at About Frank Moraes.

7 thoughts on “We Must Stop Thinking the Rich Are Better”

Hancock: Traitors, Mr. Dickinson? To what? The British crown, or the British half-crown? Fortunately there are not enough men of property in America to dictate policy.John Dickinson: Perhaps not. But don’t forget that most men without property would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.

The middle class hasn’t gotten that they have to work with others yet. That is why. We don’t have unions anymore. They have been so poisoned by the way that anti-union forces work in this country that it is unlikely that will change any time soon.

We need to have more ways to connect people who want to fight politically and right now it is somewhat scattershot and all too often solely in reaction to Republicans being in the White House. One activist I talked to said that way back in 1992 when Clinton won, everything for the left dried up. I believe that same thing happened with Obama. Once we had the White House the fairweather friends disappeared because after all, he could fix it. But one man cannot alone do it.

It will be necessary to cultivate a hatred of the wealthy as broadly as possible. Nick Hanauer gets it. But I don’t know of more like him. Either rat bastards who are guilty of trying to resurrect feudalism, or those guilty of not caring enough to stop it.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…

People are biased in favour of the powerful. This is why poor people often tend to admire the rich and blame milquetoast centrists (‘far leftists’) for their difficulties. It’s tribalist thinking. It’s animal; people favour the well-off because it is safer to back a winner. It’s like the dominance hierarchy in a wolf pack.

Rationality and democratic thinking are not natural. Domination and obedience are. For those of us who think that rationality and democracy are better for us, even if not natural, well tough times are ahead.

We do need a widespread discussion that sharply challenges the justice of existing distributions of power. We need to insist that rich people don’t work harder than do others. And I think we’re going to have to be a little inflammatory about it, and even at times unfair. We’re going to need to be willing to offend – deeply.

Are rationality and democracy unnatural? (Well, maybe rationality.) Many pre-industrial people had a form of democracy, or consensus decision-making. At least among males. A status symbol in many Pacific Northwest tribes was the “potlach.” One displayed status by throwing a feast where one gave most possessions away.

Humans are social animals, and we can learn democratic behavior. Even, as hard as that may seem right now, less sexist and xenophobic democratic behavior. But I’m not sure on this. I am sure our culture has taken a huge jump in worshipping wealth, and it’s possible to scale that back a little.

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